Recent significant shifts in technology, business, and demographics have greatly disrupted the traditional means by which content (e.g., news) is delivered and consumed. In addition to the traditional means by which news is disseminated, consumers of news now have several alternative choices from which to come up to speed with the latest happenings and occurrences. For instance, there are approximately fifty million ‘blogs’ on the Internet that disseminate news related information. Some such blogs claim readerships as large as many traditional news outlets, such as newspapers.
New commercial players further impact the news consumed by many viewers and readers. These commercial players leverage their technology-based offerings in the areas of news aggregation, news personalization, news content brokering, news content discovery, and reader edited online news sites. This has led to a distinguishable gap between Traditional Media (often referred to as Corporate Media) and the so-called Alternative Media. The Traditional Media companies which still employ most of the professional journalists (experts at gathering, fact checking, and editing the news) have very little choice but to erase this gap if they are to survive as viable businesses.
Therefore, there is a need to synergize the Traditional Media with the Alternative Media. Moreover, there is a need to provide such synergy through an automated and accessible interface whereby news producers are able to quickly and efficiently make available their content to news distributors. New distributors should then be able to quickly acquire the content and disseminate the content according to what content is deemed valuable, accurate, newsworthy, etc.
An automated system of organizing and distributing news can also have applications for searching for and delivering other searchable content which can include documents (e.g., articles, websites, news, books, etc.), video (e.g., movies, documentaries shows or any other professional or armature video clips), or music (e.g., songs, albums, etc.).